Hindu–Arabic numeral system
The glyphs in actual use are descended from Brahmi numerals and have split into various typographical variants since the Middle Ages.
Sometime around 600 CE, a change began in the writing of dates in the Brāhmī-derived scripts of India and Southeast Asia, transforming from an additive system with separate numerals for numbers of different magnitudes to a positional place-value system with a single set of glyphs for 1–9 and a dot for zero, gradually displacing additive expressions of numerals over the following several centuries.
[5] When this system was adopted and extended by medieval Arabs and Persians, they called it al-ḥisāb al-hindī ("Indian arithmetic").
Brahmi and Kharosthi numerals were used alongside one another in the Maurya Empire period, both appearing on the 3rd century BCE edicts of Ashoka.
The place-value system is used in the Bakhshali manuscript, the earliest leaves being radiocarbon dated to the period 224–383 CE.
[12] The development of the positional decimal system takes its origins in[clarification needed] Indian mathematics during the Gupta period.
The Sanskrit translation of the lost 5th century Prakrit Jaina cosmological text Lokavibhaga may preserve an early instance of the positional use of zero.
[19] These books are principally responsible for the diffusion of the Hindu system of numeration throughout the Islamic world and ultimately also to Europe.
In Christian Europe, the first mention and representation of Hindu–Arabic numerals (from one to nine, without zero), is in the Codex Vigilanus (aka Albeldensis), an illuminated compilation of various historical documents from the Visigothic period in Spain, written in the year 976 CE by three monks of the Riojan monastery of San Martín de Albelda.
The credit for first establishing widespread understanding and usage of the decimal positional notation among the general population goes to Adam Ries, an author of the German Renaissance, whose 1522 Rechenung auff der linihen und federn (Calculating on the Lines and with a Quill) was targeted at the apprentices of businessmen and craftsmen.
In China, Gautama Siddha introduced Hindu numerals with zero in 718 CE, but Chinese mathematicians did not find them useful, as they had already had the decimal positional counting rods.
